Checking the Lights
by Ykari
Summary: He's the only person she knows isn't a figment of her imagination. It's odd to think she trusts him but these days, he's the only one she trusts. Takes place during How Long is Forever. Raven and a mystery character. Non romantic.


Checking the Lights

He walks down the hallway with heavy footsteps. He's not actually a heavy person, he's quite small in fact, but there's a great deal of tech equipment both hidden and clearly visible on his person and it weighs him down. He doesn't seem to notice the weight at all, or else he's long since grown used to it, but it makes his tread louder than it ought to be and she can hear him coming down the hallway long before he reaches the room.

She loves the noise he makes because it's the only noise she knows is real.

He checks up on her once a day. Usually in the evenings but he'll come in the mornings on the very rare occasions where he misses a day. Not that she notices. She's lost track of time ages ago and measures her days only in his visits. She wouldn't know he'd missed a day unless he said something. He talks to her most days, not about anything she'd be interested in, but it's comforting nevertheless to know that life goes on in Jump City.

Most days, she doesn't respond. She doesn't have anything to say to him and at any rate, he's not really talking to her. He's talking to himself and she just happens to be there. So she largely ignores him. Sometimes she worries that she's forgotten how to talk, it's been so long. So she'll say his name or ask him about something she doesn't actually care about. To his credit, he never jumps at the sound anymore and he always answers as honestly as possible. Or she thinks he does. She doesn't actually have any way of knowing whether he's lying or not but she doesn't care that much anyway. She just needs to hear her own voice, to make sure it's still there.

And he has to be around when she does it because otherwise how will she know she isn't just imagining it? She's talked to her hallucinations before, but it's getting hard to tell if she's really talking or if she just thinks she is. It's odd. In the beginning, the hallucinations were the trouble, back when she wasn't sure if they were real or not. But she knew her own voice was. These days, she knows the figments are always false, and it's whether her voice is real or not that bothers her.

He knows about the hallucinations because she's told him about them. The first year was the worst. The first year, she'd failed to recognize them for the illusions they were and had occasionally had elaborate hallucinations which she would follow out of the room and onto the streets, often to dead ends, leaving her lost and confused and frustrated. He'd always found her and brought her back and she always tried to explain it to him. They were there. She saw them. They had talked to her... But they were never real. He's never called her insane. He's never even implied that she might be. She knows he doesn't like thinking she is. But she knows. And she sees no reason not to admit it.

She dislikes lying to herself, which is part of the reason she hates the figments so much. It's impossible for her to tell if her powers are creating actual images or if she is simply imagining something there. They never appear when he's in the room so she can't ask him. So she wonders if it's her mind tricking her or her powers. And then she realizes there's no real difference anyway.

He enters the room without saying anything. He doesn't start talking until he starts checking everything. His voice is comforting, one of the few comforts in her life. So when he speaks, she listens. And for the first time in years, what he says makes her turn to look at him.

"Raven, was someone in here?"

She stares at him dully for a long moment. He's taller than he used to be, but he's still short, barely brushing 5 feet. He's clean shaven and still bald, although she recalls him once saying that he's not naturally so. He shaves his head because it's recognizable and being easily recognized is an invaluable asset in his line of work. His eyes are pure white, something she's never understood and he's never explained, and at the moment they're staring at something on the floor. She follows his gaze to a small puddle of water near the door.

"No one ever comes in here but you." Her voice is low and she's vaguely pleased that it's still there. She yelled at a figment earlier, or she thought she had, but it was nice to be sure.

"Raven, this is melted snow. Someone came in here and tracked snow on the floor. Do you know who it was?"

She looks back up at him from the puddle and cocks her head slightly. "Maybe it was you."

His voice is patient and calm, he's always patient with her. Explaining everything methodically, just like he used to explain how the figments couldn't possibly be real. "I live upstairs Raven. I didn't go outside before I came in here. I haven't been out in the snow all day and this wasn't here yesterday. It had to be someone else."

"There's no one. Nobody comes in here." She blinks at him with a somewhat glazed expression, "They never come back."

He considers for a long moment and she starts to think he's going to give up the line of conversation. He hasn't checked the lights yet, something he does every day. She doesn't know why, they've never faded in all the years she's lived here. She thinks it might just be his excuse for visiting. He owns the room, owns the entire building in fact which she is vaguely aware is almost entirely in disrepair. He does live upstairs but it's only one of several hideouts he has all across the city. He says it's not his nicest one, although it is his most regularly used one.

She's never been completely sure why he lets her stay here. The logical part of her, a part that's been dying for years now, points out that it's probably to make sure she doesn't get better. So she stays out of the fight for the city and doesn't interfere with his crimes. Another part thinks he does it to gloat to himself. Or to remind himself that even the mighty fall. And there's a small, but loud part of her thinks that maybe he just wanted someone to talk to who would always be around and would never turn on him. Because she wouldn't. She's broken beyond all repair and they both know it. And she understands why he needs that kind of contact because she needs it too. She can't be sure he'll always be that for her. Certainly he's much more able to leave than she is, but he's stuck around for twenty years which is longer than the Titans did.

How odd that someone she had fought on a regular basis and jailed many times over had turned out to be more trustworthy than her dearest friends. Friends who'd drifted away and abandoned her so easily.

But he hasn't abandoned her and he eventually moves to check on the lights like he always does. She turns away, taking comfort in his dependable routine. He doesn't say anything else while he inspects all the lights (and the room has many lights) but as he opens the door, he pauses as if something has just occurred to him.

"Raven."

She doesn't turn around but her head shifts to indicate she's listening.

"Did you dream about anyone today?"

It's a question he's never asked before. He dislikes talking about her hallucinations, partially because they make him uncomfortable and partially because he really doesn't want to know how frequently she has them. If he doesn't ask, he can pretend they're rare.

"Yes. It was..." She thinks for a moment because she tries very hard to ignore the figments and she doesn't really recall what it said. But a thought occurs to her and she concentrates on remembering what the voice sounded like rather than the words. What the figments said was always the same. But she knew they were different from the voices. "Starfire. I heard a figment of Starfire." She doesn't say she saw it, because she didn't. She doesn't look at them anymore. They're harder to ignore if she looks. And it hurts more when they fade away.

He's quiet and still for what feels like eons but is probably only a few minutes. She doesn't know why. Her hallucinating about Starfire is hardly new. Starfire is easily her most frequent hallucination and he knows it. She doesn't see why the water on the floor is important anyway. It doesn't matter how it got in. It has no effect on her. And she doesn't see how it connects to her figments anyway. A figment can't track snow into her room.

He moves abruptly, towards her rather than the open door. "Raven, turn around." She obeys without thinking, although she doesn't see the point. He gently removes the ancient communicator at her throat and opens the back of it. He takes something small out of the back of it, something she vaguely recognizes as a long-burned out power core, and replaces it with a newer one from his pocket. It beeps once and he closes it up and reattaches it to her cloak. "I don't... I don't know what's going to happen. I need to investigate this. But if something happens, Raven..." He hesitates for a moment. "Just be safe."

He leaves the room and closes the door softly behind him. She can hear his footsteps echo down the hallway, towards the entrance of the building rather than back up the stairs. She turns back to her corner, once again alone with her thoughts.

He's long gone by the time her own thought process clicks in her head. A figment can't track snow. There's melted snow inside her room. A figment can't have brought it. She had a hallucination about Starfire coming into her room. A _real _person could have brought it but he couldn't have because he wasn't in the snow. So then...

She blinks rapidly and whirls around to stare at the patch of water that's still on the floor. She glares at it angrily, unsure if it's real or not. She drifts over to it warily and leans down to touch it. It's not cold anymore, but she hardly expected it to be. The building is well insulated and her room has always been warm. It feels real, but she's not quite sure she even remembers what water feels like. She hasn't eaten or drank anything in over a decade, she doesn't need to. Her demonic side sustains her, the only thing it's good for.

She considers dismissing it completely. Going back to her corner and pretending it was never there and her only companion for the past twenty years hadn't left the room to investigate the possible reappearance of someone who had been indirectly responsible for the Titans breaking up. And rationally, it couldn't have been her. She was gone. That was that. Some kid had probably snuck in and very quickly snuck back out as soon as they realized who they were sharing a room with. It's that simple. Starfire couldn't possibly have been there.

But in the end, Raven drifts back to a corner of the room and quietly hopes that he comes back soon with an explanation. So strange that she trusts him with this task. But she does trust him. She trusts that he'll find out exactly what he wants to know and will tell her anything he learns. She trusts he won't abandon her like everyone else has over the years. She trusts that he had a perfectly good reason to turn her communicator back on.

And when her communicator blinks to life, hours later, she leaves the sanctity of the room for the first time in two decades. Not because she's sure this is real. God knows it could just be her most elaborate hallucination yet. No, she leaves because even if it isn't real, she trusts that he'll track her down and bring her back to safety, even if she ends up in a back alleyway in a city she no longer recognizes. And she trusts that tomorrow, she'll hear Gizmo's footsteps down the hallway when he comes back to check the lights.


End file.
